1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to electronic mail systems and, more specifically, to displaying and acting upon email conversations across folders.
2. Description of the Background Art
Electronic mail (“email”) has become an important means of communication. Many email users have large email mailboxes with numerous messages. Therefore, it is often convenient to group related messages together in order to enable users to automatically view related messages without having to search their mailbox. A grouping of related messages that are considered to be part of a single conversation is often referred to as a “conversation” in the art. An example of a conversation is an initial message and the subsequent replies to or forwards of such message (this is also referred to as an “email thread”).
In known email systems (sometimes also referred to as “collaboration suites” when they provide functionality in addition to just email, such as “calendar” and “contacts”), conversations are limited to related email messages within a single folder. In other words, known systems do not enable conversations to span folders in a user's mailbox. It is desirable to enable conversations to span folders, such as in the following example scenario: User #1 receives an email from a customer and forwards it to user #2to handle. User #1 moves the customer's email to the “trash” folder under the assumption that user #2 is handling the matter. If the customer emails user #1 again regarding the same subject matter, it is convenient for the email user #1 to see the customer's new message and original message automatically grouped together despite being in different folders (the original in “Trash” and the new one in “Inbox”). Known systems do not enable such grouping, but the present invention does.
Also, because known systems do not track conversations across folders, it is not possible to perform an action on a conversation across folders. For instance, if a user has some related email message in different folders, under the known art it is not possible for the user to tag all the messages in that conversation with one command.
It is worth noting that, in Google's current version of its email service “Gmail,” it appears that conversations span at least some folders (namely, “Inbox”, “Sent Mail” “Drafts,” and “Starred”), but this is not the case. Gmail currently has only three folders: “All Mail,” “Trash,” and “Spam,” and Google does not enable conversations to span such folders. Google presents “Inbox,” “Sent Items,” “Draft,” and “Starred” as folders, but these actually are not folders.
Folders are an organizational concept that partition messages in a mailbox so that every message is in one and only one folder. As stated above, in Gmail, the Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, and Draft “folders” are not folders, Rather, the Inbox “folder” is the search results of all items in the All Mail folder with the label “Inbox”, the Starred “folder” is the search results for items in the All Mail folder flagged with a star, the Sent Mail “folder” is the search results for items in the All Mail folder sent by the user, and the Drafts “folder” is the search results for items in the All Mail folder which have not yet been sent. The consequence of that is that a single-message conversation can appear in Gmail's Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, and Draft “folders” at the same time because such conversation is really just in the “All Mail” folder. However, Google does not enable conversations to span “Inbox” and “Trash” because “Trash” is a separate folder from “All Mail.” Similarly, in Gmail, conversations cannot span “Trash” and “Spam” or “All Mail” and “Spam” because these are all separate folders.